All posts in category cross-country

In an area known more for gold-mining and gambling, there’s something even more precious under the ground: Hot water. Reno has gone geothermal. It was something I had to go out and see for myself. Ormat Technologies Inc. provides enough geothermal power to provide electricity to the “biggest little city in America.”

And it’s not alone. While geothermal isn’t for every city in America, it has potential in some areas – enough for $400 million to be set aside for research in the Obama stimulus bill.

Check out this video, which runs through how Reno and Ormat do geothermal. And here’s a spoiler alert: There’s a cameo by Nevada’s governor.

Lest you think I was embellishing the depth of winter we had to punch through to get to sunny Santa Barbara, check out some footage of us in our Mercury Mariner as we crawled through the mountains. Luckily, we had on chains and were trailing a snowplow. ECO:nomics conference, here we come!

OK, so we went dark for a bit. Turns out that cross-country travel is harder than we thought, especially when you factor in Mother Nature. On the road right now, Santa Barbara or bust, however late we get to The Wall Street Journal’s ECO:nomics conference. We set out early Tuesday morning with what we thought was plenty of time to get to Santa Barbara. And then the snow struck. Interstate 80 across the Sierra was buried under a foot of snow. Great for skiing, it was’t so good for driving. I felt a bit of panic when CalTrans announced on its 1-800 line that chains were required across Donner Pass through Truckee. I just remember the Donner Pass in reference to the family that ate its own to survive. Great! We found a cottage industry of roadside entrepreneurs at “chain check” willing to install our chains for 30 bucks. The guy who installed ours had been doing so for 30 years. He said he “doesn’t know anything different.” We only managed to scrape together 26 bucks. It was enough for him. And well worth it for him. I should add that his installation came after a failed attempt on my part to install the damned chains, myself. Not something needed much in Georgia, or New York, for that matter. Truckee locals made fun of me. In any event, once the chains were installed, we managed to go the next four hours at about 30 miles per hour. Stangely, the average MPG on the Mariner still hovered at around 26. But I have to say, the Mariner did us proud, especially considering it is only front-wheel drive. About four hours behind, we managed to scale the Sierras, and on the other end, decided we’d take off the chains ourselves. Bad move. Sounds simple. It’s not. Nut of it: The chains ended up tangled up in our chassis somehow. If Ford is reading this, um…. no permanent damage. I ended up cold, sopping wet, and later desperately changing into dry clothes in a sketchy Subway in Colfax, California. Thank God for those ski-like road markers so I knew where the road was.

Anyway, I’m in another world now, looking out at the green of central California’s “salad bowl” just south of Salinas, wondering why the fertile landscape hasn’t translated into green collar jobs. I’m driving amid some of the highest unemployment rates in California.

The open sky in Wyoming is intoxicating. There’s so much of it. That’s one reason, I guess, there are so many windmills, at least from what I could see off I80, and also, at least one random industrial sight that looks like it might be capable of staging intergalactic warfare.

Maybe it’s my time in California, but I always seem to become more hopeful as I head west, living the “go west, young man” mantra. That, or driving into the sunset every night makes one a bit sanguine about the torrent of depressing financial news. In researching this trip, I ran across a number of wind entrepreneurs in Wyoming who are looking to build massive wind farms here, employing out-of-work miners. Unlike parts of Kansas, I actually saw windmills moving here.

We know Greensburg has been headlined a lot recently — including in this blog — and we don’t want to over-Greensburg our readers, but the below tale, as told by our own Lauren Goode, is definitely worth telling.

Shortly after a series of deadly tornados tore through Greensburg, Kansas, population 1,400, in May 2007, Kenneth Bonin headed to the site with his church group to lend assistance. The LEED-accredited Senior Superintendent for McCownGordon would travel back there twice within the next few months with Habitat for Humanities to help rebuild the town. It was a four hour trek from his home in Gardner, Kansas, and while Mr. Bonin did not know anyone personally that was killed or displaced in the devastation, he was sadly accustomed to seeing the impact of natural disasters, having grown up in a small town off the hurricane-prone Gulf of Mexico. He felt he had to be in Greensburg.

So when his bosses at his Kansas City construction company asked Mr. Bonin to oversee the building of the LEED-platinum Greensburg K-12 School, “I said yes before they’d even finished asking,” Mr. Bonin says.

“Kenneth was a shoe-in for this job, considering his past in philanthropy and experience with sustainability projects,” says McCownGordon Marketing Coordinator Krista Sutter.

Before the tornados, which had levels of EF-3 or stronger, touched down, the Greensburg public school system consisted of an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school, all of which were leveled to the basements. In the aftermath of the Greensburg tornado, Mr. Bonin says the initial reaction throughout the town was, “how do we rebuild this place? Do we rebuild this place?” The issue was that a lot of families were dispersed across the state and some had left entirely, maybe forever. Having been flagged as a federal disaster area, FEMA came to the aid of the town, setting up trailers and creating what Mr. Bonin called “FEMAville.” Once it was determined that the town would be rebuilt, it was decided that there was only one way to go: Green.

For the record, I had planned to visit Greensburg, Kansas well before President Obama mentioned it in his speech to Congress on Feb. 23. A good thing he did, though, because it let me put his eye-catching name in the headline above. But, it’s not as if the town was some well-kept secret. Destroyed by a massive tornado two years ago, it is rebuilding green. It has already been in the news a lot, but many of the reports on it seemed somewhat breathless and left me with questions, like, why would a tiny, stagecoach burg in the middle of the country suddenly decide to spend a lot more money and develop an environmental consciousness after not really doing much in that direction since its founding in 1886? Maybe that sounds cynical, but if we’re really want to build in a greener and more-sustainable way, it’s important to understand what motivates Americans. What I found is in my video. Click away, but if you don’t like cliffhangers, the answer isn’t as simple as I had thought. Instead, like most of life, it’s a complex calculus of human nature, public relations, tax breaks and altruism.

Bleary-eyed, I sit in a random hotel in Denver. Must. Stop. For one day. No. Must push on. Santa Barbara or bust! Anyway, we got in at 2 a.m. last night after shooting all day in Greensburg, Kansas. That’s the town President Obama mentioned in his Presidential address to Congress. It got blown away by a tornado in 2005 and is now rebuilding to green standards. What surprised me is why, and (spoiler alert!) in a video to come shortly, I look at why. That’s me, in the picture, setting up to shoot a green building in Greensburg.

Passing through the “Gateway to the West” in St. Louis, I’m surprised at how industrial the area is. On the banks of the Mississippi, a Cargill plant sits immediately across from the Gateway Arch, forging its own way through the American psyche of self-made dreams, the “good life” and the dirty work of gettings grits on the table. Cargill’s website positions it as being an “international producer and marketer of food, agricultural, financial, and industrial products and services.” Well positioned for change, if you ask me.

Kansas is surreal for a Georgia boy like me. Miles and miles of flat terrain, amber waves of grain, silos and a few lonely oil drills. You kind of get the feeling renewable energy here means pulling up to the gas pump to fill ‘er up.

If the buzz that you get on the two coasts about the future of energy is here, I’m not hearing it on this very brief drive-by. In fact, from talking to people here, it’s clear to me that the oil sector, however out of favor it has fallen, remains important to Kansas because it’s still how a lot of people in the state make their livings.

He isn’t “Joe The Plumber,” but he might as well be “Bill the Roofer.” Bill Keith showed up in a video several weeks ago when President Obama went to Elkhart, Indiana.
Keith, of St. John Indiana, and founder of SunRise Solar describes himself as a former roofer who, after hurting his back, designed a solar-powered attic fan. “Now we are selling them all over the world,” he tells me. Two million dollars worth in 2008, up from $95,000 in 2003. And he says he’s on course for $3 million this year.